I have been noting that my Alienware laptop (Windows 10 64 bits) is running much slower than it used to be. It includes a 500Go HDD which is used as the storage disk, and a second disk, a 32Go SSD which purpose it to improve the system performance.

I guess the decrease of performance I'm experiencing is due to the fact that the Intel Rapid Storage Technology is no longer active. As you can see in the screenshot below, the SSD is reported as "incompatible" (in French).

I have been looking for solutions on many forums, but nothing worked. What is weird is that the SSD seems not detected by the Windows Disk Manager (screenshot below).

My question to Intel - which I asked them to answer a couple of weeks ago (but they declined to do so) - is simple: In the new releases of Intel RST (including the latest chipset revisions), has Intel dropped support for Intel SRT? That is, has Intel dropped support for the use of all or a portion of a normal SSD (SATA or NVMe) as a high-speed cache to accelerate the performance of a HDD?

If the answer to this question is yes, it might explain what has happened (presumably as a result of an upgrade of the Intel RST software) to your system...

N. Scott Pearson: There are no reports or any information stating that the tool dropped support for the use of a normal SSD as a high-speed cache to accelerate the performance of a HDD. Remember that the acceleration feature it will not work when using an NVMe unit.

Hi BillNa: Thank you very much for providing the report. Based on the information on it, the SATA mode is set to AHCI, so, what we need to do will be to change the SATA mode to RAID , then re-install Windows from scratch and after that enable the Intel® SMART Response Technology on Intel® RST, to optimize the performance.If you want to change the state of the SSD, you can always try a low level format on it, but the SATA mode will still be set to AHCI.